Archive | February, 2009

Holy shit, tonight’s BSG episode was brutal. No serious spoilers here. But a note for those who follow the new show but never saw the old – early on, when the piano player is told that the notes he’s playing are a rip-off of some other piece of music, they are indeed: they’re the opening notes of the original 1979 show’s theme.

Back in 1999, Richard Hatch (who played Apollo on the original BSG and who plays Zarek on the new one) created a trailer for a proposed BSG continuation that would ignore Galactica 1980. For a long time this trailer has been unavailable online for legal reasons. Right now it’s on YouTube, but I don’t know whether the legal obstacles have been resolved, so watch it now in case it vanishes.

It’s interesting to see what Hatch had in mind – and strange to see him looking halfway between his Apollo and Zarek selves in appearance. For those who only know the new series, the guy with the scarred face and creepy smile who says “greetings” is the original Baltar (played by John Colicos, who some may also recall as the Klingon Commander Kor from Star Trek).

A bit over a year ago I reported discovering a website devoted to an upcoming movie adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Pirates of Venus. But then the website vanished for a while and I figured the project had fallen through. Now, though, I see that the website has risen again from the sea-foam, with the movie’s release date announced as 2010 (two years before the higher-profile John Carter of Mars is scheduled to appear).

As I’ve mentioned before, the Venus books were my first introduction to Burroughs, so they have a special nostalgia value for me and I’d really like to see this movie get made.

It’s not clear how closely the movie will follow the book(s), but the online synopsis, according to which the hero inherits a spaceship from his vanished grandfather, suggests that no great fidelity should be expected.

The original series was in large part a parody (partly on target, partly annoying) of Marxism and fascism; no word as to whether that aspect will be part of the movie.

Incidentally, back in the 70s Len Wein (creator of Swamp Thing) and Michael Kaluta did a pretty faithful graphic adaptation of the first two books in the series (under the title Carson of Venus, which is actually the name of the third book) in the back pages of Korak, Son of Tarzan:

Sam Register, one of the minds behind the animated Teen Titans series (not a bad show, but miles below Bruce Timm’s groundbreaking Batman/Superman/League animated series), when asked whether the Robin in Titans is Dick Grayson or Tim Drake (aside: incidentally, Grayson is the only answer that makes sense), answers: “I am so completely bored with the DC universe and continuity and all that crap. To me, he’s just Robin. I know all the fans give a crap, but I don’t.” In other words: turn off your brain and just swallow any shit we decide to feed you. What a contrast with Bruce Timm and his crew.

I’m watching Maddow interviewing Pelosi on security briefings that Pelosi received but was not allowed to reveal.

Pelosi says that thanks to security requirements, she could not speak out against policies she disapproved of. Duh, of course she could. Has she never heard of civil disobedience?

Maddow compares Pelosi to Spider-man and Dr. Manhattan, both lonely because they cannot reveal their secret identities to anyone. Okay, Maddow wins a point for the Watchmen reference (though she would have earned more points if she’d made it a year ago) – but loses two points because, um, Dr. Manhattan’s identity is never secret.